A Ship Named Armenian
Built during the Hamidian massacres, sunk during the Genocide
Tigran Kalaydjian, Cyprus, February 2013
The SS Armenian
The fact that SS Armenian once sailed the high seas and worked the
cargo routes of the North Atlantic is news to most people, including
Armenians.
Built as a freighter, the SS Armenian was a valuable transportation
vessel in the profitable cargo service that existed between Great
Britain and North America at the turn of the 20th century. The exact
location of her final resting place remained a mystery until 2008,
when her wreck was discovered off the western coast of England and she
was seen for the first time since World War I.
For a ship born during the Hamidian massacres, it was perhaps
inevitable that she would meet her doom in that darkest of years –
1915 – at the same time as the people with whom she shared her name
were being driven to their ghastly death.
This is the story of the SS Armenian…
The SS Armenian was built in 1895 by Harland & Wolff, the Belfast
shipyard that would later become famous for making the legendary trio
Titanic, Olympic and Britannic. The vessel was 156 metres long and had
a displacement of 8,825 tonnes. She was launched on Nov. 25, 1895 as
the SS Indian for Frederick Leyland & Co, but wasn’t delivered until
September of the following year, by which time she had been renamed
the SS Armenian.
With very little contact between Great Britain and a nation called
Armenia, the clue behind the sudden name change lies in the events
inundating the British press throughout 1895-96. For during that
horrific time, the Sultan and the ruling elite of the Ottoman Empire
were diligently putting into action their final solution to the
`Armenian Question’, a solution which required the destruction of the
empire’s Armenian minority as a cohesive unit and its dispersal
throughout the country. Their abominable policy involved forced
assimilation, the settling of Turks in Armenian-populated regions, the
incitement of Moslem fanatics and Kurdish militias to commit
atrocities against unarmed Armenians, and a plan of organized,
indiscriminate killing of men, women and children by the sultan’s
military.
Starting in the late summer of 1894, the massacres of Armenians had
gradually grown in scale and reach, eventually encompassing several
large provinces in the east of the empire. In October 1895, reports of
the slaughter of hundreds of Armenian men in the town of Erzurum
provoked shock and indignation across the world. Newspaper articles
regularly depicted the sultan as a bloodthirsty tyrant, a butcher of
women and children, and sympathy for the Armenians was widespread.
Leading newspapers such as the Times, Morning Post, Daily News, New
York Times and Le Petit Parisien published articles and editorials by
prominent public figures condemning the Turkish crimes. Heartwrenching
eyewitness accounts were bringing home the magnitude of the massacres,
filling the public both in Europe and America with disgust and anger
at the savagery of the pogroms. One account sent by a Catholic prelate
stationed in Western Armenia described a typical scene:
Over the whole province the work of destruction has been pursued,
every town, every hamlet having been given over to pillage and murder…
The inhabitants who have been spared have been stripped of everything
of use or value. Those who fled from the doomed districts were pursued
and cut down mercilessly, without regard to age or sex, by the
barbarous Turks. The bodies of many children and young girls lie under
the charred debris of the ruined homes.[1]
By 1896 close to 300,000 innocent lives had been lost throughout the
Armenian highlands. In a speech delivered in Liverpool that year,
former Prime Minister William Gladstone protested vehemently against
the atrocities and called for resolute action by the European powers
against the Turks. Against this background, there is no doubt that the
unremitting suffering of the Armenians would have been well ingrained
in the consciousness of the wider British public. And with the
constant flow of gruesome news reports causing outrage and clamours
for justice, it is understandable why the people behind the building
of the SS Armenian would choose to rename the vessel. It may have been
a small but significant gesture, an expression of solidarity with the
Armenian people in their hour of torment and agony.
Fitted out with stables to transport horses, the SS Armenian commenced
her maiden voyage from Liverpool to Boston on Sept. 28, 1896. Three
years later she was contracted by the British authorities to serve as
a transport in the Boer War, and in 1901 she was used to transport 963
Boer prisoners of war to Bermuda.
After the war, in March 1903, the ship’s management was taken over by
the White Star Line – the same company that would come to operate the
RMS Titanic just a few years later -and she resumed her cargo service
between Liverpool and New York. In 1910 she was repainted in the
distinctive Leyland insignia -a pink funnel with a black top.
The Armenian completed her peacetime assignment in March 1914, before
being briefly laid up prior to her deployment as a horse transport
during World War I. Although not fitted as a passenger vessel, she was
used to transport the Grenadier Guards, an infantry regiment of the
British armed forces, to Belgium on the Oct. 7, 1914.
The SS Armenian began her final and fateful voyage in early June 1915
with 175 men onboard. She was chartered to carry a cargo of 1,422
mules from the United States to Bristol in England. The animals were
intended as replacements for the horses that had been lost in fighting
in France. At around 6:30pm on June 28, while heading northeast off
Trevose Head, Cornwall, a watchman on the Armenian sighted a German
submarine. In what proved to be a hugely erroneous decision, Captain
James Trickey ordered full steam in an attempt to outrun the U-boat,
which turned out to be the U-24. He was signalled to stop and
surrender after two shots were fired across his bow, but he refused.
The U-boat’s commander, Rudolf Schneider, then opened fire with the
deck gun, scoring several hits on the Armenian, one shot taking out
the Marconi room.
After more than a dozen men lay dead or injured on the deck, Trickey
finally agreed to surrender. Much to his surprise, he and the crew
were treated well by the Germans from that point on. With several
lifeboats damaged from the shelling, they were allowed to take the
remaining boats and make for the Cornish coast. The Armenian was then
sunk by two torpedoes fired into her stern. She went down in minutes.
The survivors were picked up the following day by the Belgian steam
trawler President Stevens. Four of the injured died before they could
be rescued.
Twenty-nine men lost their lives, including nineteen Americans. The
Armenian needed hands to tend to the mules, so many of the 175 men
onboard were muleteers who had been hired at Newport News, Virginia,
before sailing. Of the twenty-nine fatalities, twelve were muleteers
who refused to abandon the animals and preferred to go down with the
ship. Most of them were African-Americans.
International reaction
Following the sinking of the RMS Lusitania 52 days earlier, in which
more than a hundred Americans had lost their lives, the sinking of the
Armenian caused a second crisis between Germany and the United States,
as the majority of the men who died were again American. Much was made
in the press of this fact, with both the British and French papers
doing their best to fan the flames of anti-German sentiment in the US,
with the hope of drawing America into the war.
While the propaganda war raged in the newspapers, President Wilson
carefully considered the Armenian incident before making any official
pronouncements, preferring to wait until the investigation was over.
His procrastination proved expedient. The ship was undeniably engaged
in the transportation of contraband to England – work animals destined
for the Allied armies fighting in France – and this made her a
legitimate target according to most.
Even though the generally-accepted rules of engagement regarding the
sinking of merchant ships in wartime required a `stop and search’
approach, it was well-known that not all U-boat commanders obeyed
these rules. However, the investigation found that Rudolf Schneider
had indeed tried to stop the ship before opening fire with the deck
gun. It is almost certain that had Captain Trickey complied with the
order to stop, the SS Armenian would have been saved.
The furore caused by the sinking of the Armenian eventually abated
because of the circumstances surrounding the event, and the United
States didn’t declare war on Germany until April 1917.[2]
Discovery
In 2002 amateur divers claimed they had discovered the wreck of the SS
Armenian but their claim was soon found to be incorrect (the wreck was
of the auxiliary cruiser HMS Patia).
The SS Armenian was finally located and identified by wreck hunter and
archaeologist Innes McCartney in 2008. The discovery featured on the
History Channel in an episode of Deep Wreck Mysteries entitled Search
for the Bone Wreck. The ship sits upright in 95 metres of water,
forty-five miles from the reported location given by the British crew
at the time of the sinking. A mass of animal bones was found inside
the ship, a testament to the hundreds of animals whose deaths were but
a minor statistic in a global conflagration that claimed millions of
lives and provided ideal cover for the commission of one of mankind’s
greatest ever crimes – the Armenian Genocide.
Tigran Kalaydjian
Author of Sentinel of Truth: Gourgen Yanikian and the Struggle
Against the Denial of the Armenian Genocide (2012)
[1] The account was published in the periodical Catholic World in May 1895.
[2] It is worth noting that although press accounts at the time
identified the U-38 as the culprit, because the survivors said this
was the number visible on the conning tower, it was in fact the U-24
and Schneider who sank the Armenian.
http://www.keghart.com/Kalaydjian-Ship